Review of thermodynamic models in polymer solutions

Abstract

The equilibrium data of solvent-polymer systems are important to industrial processes, while they are very difficult to be obtained directly because of the complexity of the systems. It appears to be vital to obtain the data of solvent-polymer systems accurately by establishing thermodynamic models. This work presents a review of the four important thermodynamic models, e.g., UNIFAC, UNIQUAC, Flory-Huggins (FH) and ENSIC. Generally, they all can be used to predict the phase equilibrium of polymer-solvent systems. Of those, UNIFAC model is used most often, FH model is the simplest, ENISC model is showed to be the most accurate and UNIQUAC model is seemed to be applicable to most of the systems.